Staging a reversal of fortune

January 9 2003

Michelle Arrow, left and playwright Oriel Gray.

A new book celebrates the unknown heroines of Australian drama, writes Karen Heinrich.

Decades before it became a standard way to combine work and family, a generation of trail-blazing Australian women were nurturing their families while simultaneously indulging their true passion: writing drama.

This was in the first half of the 20th century, and, although these women wrote a wide range of dramatic material that addressed the social and political concerns of their eras, their stories have largely been forgotten. But a new book, by Michelle Arrow, seeks to remind us of them.

For Arrow, inspiration for the book hit during a discussion of prominent 1970s playwrights in a tutorial on contemporary Australian drama she was attending at university in the early 1990s.

"When we talked about playwrights from before the 1970s, it was all about Louis Esson and Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll," she recalls. "And I thought, 'there has to be some Australian women playwrights somewhere in this story'."

And, of course, there were. Arrow's book, Upstaged: Australian Women Dramatists in the Limelight at Last, tells how Oriel Gray's play The Torrents tied with Seventeenth Doll in a Playwrights' Advisory Board competition in 1955.");document.write("

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Gray's achievement has been sidelined because "we like our national stories simple", says Arrow, "and theatre is no exception".

"I think many people assume that Australian playwrights since the 1970s sprang from nowhere. But I was very surprised at the number of women - there really were quite a few - who wrote for the New Theatre (movement)."

Why, then, has these women's work been overlooked? Arrow says it's partly because, up until the 1970s, history was written from a male perspective, and because baby boomers have attempted to control the terms of cultural debate.

"It's that sense of saying, 'We did it first'," says Arrow. "So there's a lack of respect paid to their forebears."

For Arrow, who is now researching a book on the history of post-1950s popular culture in Australia, Upstaged started as a PhD thesis seven years ago. Incorporating personal narratives within a broader social and cultural history that shaped the writing lives of female authors, Upstaged tells the stories of women who wrote drama that was performed on the nation's stages and broadcast across the airwaves from 1928 to '68.

According to Arrow, those years mark the beginning and the decline of women's prominence in playwriting in Australia. The former heralded the beginning of Betty Roland's career as a playwright, when her first full-length play, The Touch of Silk, made its premiere at the Melbourne Repertory Theatre.

Moreover, the start of World War II, which naturally forced a lot of men to work in wartime industries, opened up a space for women, particularly in writing for radio.

"There was a real market for their work, which helped allow them to establish themselves professionally," Arrow says.

The four decades between 1928 and '68 saw the rise of the New Theatre movement and the rise and fall of radio drama, two developments that had major implications for playwrights, according to Arrow.

Women had a strong writing presence within the New Theatre movement from its inception. Of the 80 Australian-written at Sydney New Theatre from 1933 to '68 (including revivals), 44 of them were written or co-written by women.

It was here, Arrow says, that politically aware women writers found an outlet "which wasn't about making sandwiches".

"Their political views are clearly reflected in their plays, which provided them with a very different way to be politically active," she says.

Certainly, their writing allowed them to express their views on social injustice via morally driven dramas for the stage, popular radio series, musicals, and agitprop sketches performed outside factory gates.

"Things they were concerned with were Aboriginal rights - although very much within a 1950s liberal framework - as well as immigration," Arrow says. "Plus, people were writing plays about colonialism that were really quite internationalist."

Women dramatists of the early 20th century, Arrow says, tended to depict their female characters as empathetic, while the males were invariably complex and emotional. One play, The Dangerous Sex, was written in 1948 by Joan Gibson, whom Arrow says "disappeared into thin air".

"She wrote this play about a woman who was a union organiser who travels back to ancient Greece to look at women's social position throughout the centuries, which I didn't expect to see such an explicitly feminist play," she says. "Plus, some of the writers were quite racy. Dymphna Cusack was a dramatist who was acutely aware of the complications and benefits afforded by female sexuality."

Arrow was also surprised by the confessional tone of some of the women's plays.

"They certainly drew bits and pieces of their lives into their work," she says. "The women are very upfront about their personal lives, and how messy they were. Exactly how up-front they were becomes clear when you read male biographies and they don't mention any of that. But these women acknowledge their flaws."

The women were happy to tell their stories to Arrow. "I think there was a sense of having some small tribute paid to them," she says.

As Gray told her: "I think we deserve a few withered laurels."

Michelle Arrow's Upstaged: Australian Women Dramatists in the Limelight at Last is published by Currency Press.